Photography 101 (Make-up): Mystery

This is a make-up post for a previous Photo101 assignment: Mystery. We were supposed to take a photo that creates a sense of mystery.

Well, mystery didn’t speak to me on the day of the assignment, so I decided not to force it. I’d wait for mystery to come to me. The other day when I was at the Mosby House to photograph Architecture, I walked around the back of the house and instantly felt a sense of unease and mystery. Mosby’s kitchen house is a little creepy. The kitchen house, sometimes called a summer kitchen, is separate from the main house. 19th century kitchens lacked modern refrigeration and food preservation, so they tended to be pretty rank places. You didn’t want that smell in your fancy main house, so you built a separate kitchen house out back. Kitchen houses often had a second story, used as slave quarters.

Mosby’s kitchen house is in pretty sad shape. But that neglect definitely provides a sense of mystery. The peeling paint. The splintered doors. Why are there two doors, right next to each other? Both padlocked. The imposing shadow on the left. And the little mouse hole at the base of the door on the right. Oh, and the thermometer on the side of the house that probably hasn’t worked since 1953.